id have worked on two new Dooms; the first was scrapped in 2011 after mild reception to Rage seemed to trigger a rethink at the seminal shooter studio. Bethesda marketing man Pete Hines later said the earlier, nascent game was "not Doom 4". Something was missing – and now that there's footage, we can begin to see what.
Sourced from Vimeo and posted on Doom World and then Kotaku yesterday, the video is assembled from both in-engine footage and a 2012 trailer by cinematics outfit Blur Studio – which was abandoned when the game was canned.
The in-game stuff suggests more of the up-close, idiosyncratic character work that impressed in Rage. But the wider picture doesn't look like id at all – portraying an anti-alien resistance movement across a shattered cityscape.
Try to ignore the dubbed-in soundtrack, which only compounds the sense that this really isn't Doom.
id studio director Tim Willits told IGN in 2013 that Doom 4 suffered an "identity crisis".
"It wasn't one thing," he said. "It wasn't like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And [Doom] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn't have a personality.
"Everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it's very hard to articulate."
When our Tim saw new Doom E3 footage we saw yesterday back that up?